Pick your 23 in their order of certainty

looks like some one else is playing this game too...

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/players/powerranking?team=USA&cc=5901

 

glad someone said it..

 

I think this is about right. I am crossing my fingers that Ching drops to the end of the FW depth chart and is a sub versus a starter.

 

It may mean that he's played mainly against the easier opposition.

 

I'll throw my hat in the ring on this one...and steal Duet's top 13.

1. Tim Howard: (GK) *
2. Landon Donovan (LM) *
3. Clint Dempsey (RM) *
4. Oguichi Onyewu (CB) *
5. Michael Bradley (CM) *
6. Jermaine Jones (CM) *
7. Carlos Bocanegra (LB) *
8. Jozy Altidore (ST) *
9. Jonathan Spector (RB) *
10. Jay DeMerit (CB) *
11. Charlie Davies (ST) *

These are our likely starters


Top backups right now are as follows

12. Steve Cherundolo (RB)
13. Brian Ching (ST)
14. Brad Guzan (GK)
15. Benny Feilhaber (CM or RM)
16. Maurice Edu (Destroyer)
17. Clarence Goodson (CB)
18. Danny Califf (CB)

That leaves us with 5 spots open. 1 more for a keeper. Left back depth. One more striker and two more mids.

Likely last 5

19. Heath Pearce (LB)
20. Marcus Hahnemann (GK)
21. Eddie Johnson (ST) don't laugh. We will need another speedy forward should Davies go down and EJ finished last season strong and has been good thus far in preseason for Fulham. I think EJ is going to play his way back into this team.
22. Jose Francisco Torres (MD)
23. Vagina McDoucheyPoo

OK, so I can't decide on #23. Fact is, there are about 5 or 6 guys that could play their way in or out of this team over the next several months.

Edgar Castillo, if he works out, would provide depth at left back and left midfield pushing Heath Pearce off the squad. I don't rate Bornstein at all.

If Bradley decides to go with just three forwards, DaMarcus Beasley could make his way into the roster if he finds a club. Freddy Adu could play his way onto this roster as well.

simple fact is, the final two or three roster spots are going to be anything but simple to pick

 

That I'm not impressed with a striker who seems to have difficulty scoring against a defense better than mediocre.

In 38 caps, he's scored 10 goals.

2 against each of Barbados and T&T, 1 against each of Jamaica, El Salvador, Guatemala (friendly), Venezuela (their C team in a friendly), Cuba and Honduras.

That in a five years career. For a player who does little more than wait for the ideal pass, it seems too little.

 

1. Landon Donovan
2. Tim Howard
3. Carlos Bocanegra
4. Oguchi Onyewu
5. Clint Dempsey
6. Jozy Altidore
7. Jermaine Jones
8. Michael Bradley
9. Jay Demerit
10. Steve Cherundolo
11. Charlie Davies
12. Jonathan Spector
13. Ricardo Clark
14. Benny Feilhaber
15. Brad Guzan
16. Brian Ching
17. Maurice Edu
18. Frankie Hedjuk
19. Jonathan Bornstein
20. Stuart Holden
21. Robbie Rogers
22. Freddy Adu
23. Troy Perkins

 

what? you mean you judge a forward by his ability to score goals??

if we're going to go by that Ching stat brought up earlier, then Steve Ralston should have easily made the WC squad in Germany.

 

I think you're mistaking Venezuela for the Venezuela C-team.

 

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Marvell has a soccer IQ equivilent to a retarded bannana slug. His entire career has been built on raw athletic ability. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to have ever bothered to teach the guy that dribbling the ball doesn't entail kicking the ball 20 yards in front of you and then trying to outrun everyone to it. Nobody taught Marvel that the point of crossing the ball was to actually find a teammate in the box, not a peanut vendor in the second deck.

Marvel is probably the most pure athletic specimen in U.S. soccer right now. It's why we always talk about his recovery speed. But the fact is, if he new proper positioning and technique, we wouldn't have to worry about him having to recover all the time.

I said the same thing about Quavas Kirk when he was 17 and drafted by the Galaxy. His soccer IQ was horrible and I predicted that he had peaked at 17. All of my collegues thought I was crazy. Four years later and he's struggling to get minutes in USL 1 for one of the worst teams in that league.

Soccer IQ. Wynne doesn't have it. Never will.

 

This is the argument against Ching that really drives me crazy. Chings job is NOT scoring goals. There are goal scorers and there are facilitators. Ching is a facilitator.

Think of Ching like a Ben Wallace when he played for the Pistons. Wallace was not an offensive threat, but you had to pay attention to him because he was a monster on the glass. And he was so strong that one guy usually wasn't enough to keep him off the glass. As a result of teams trying to keep Wallace off the offensive glass, the lane opened up for teammates to score easy buckets.

Ching is a monster in the air and is hands down without rival the best player in our pool at holding the ball up. As a defender you have to pay attention to that, and Ching is such a handful and eats up so much space that often times a second defender is called over to handle him. When that happens lanes that you could drive a Mack Truck through open up for his teammates and goals happen.

Ching doesn't score goals. He makes it a hell of a lot easier for his teammates to score goals though.

People see that he lines up close to goal and they pidgeon whole his job as that of a goal scorer. That's AYSO tactics 101. Ching is a space eater, a possession guy, and a facilitator. And he is one of the best in the entire U.S. pool at doing all three.

 

Why do I think all this "Wynne doesn't know soccer/no technique" bull is a combination of his freakish ability, his father being a baseball player, and (I'm gonna hear it for this) being black.

The handful of times I've watched Wynne play, he's been just as good a dribbler as any other fullbacks we have (maybe better than Bornstein, Pearce, Spector). So he gets caught out of position a lot? Name an MLS fullback who doesn't get embarassed once in a while.

The guy has been playing soccer since grade school just like everyone else in the player pool, and I've seen little evidence that he's some sort of misfit amongst MLS-level defenders.

 

Conor Casey is a lot closer to the team that most of you all think. The guy started our last WCQ and appeared in four of five CC games, at a time when BB showed far less faith in other players. Whether he deserves to be around in another matter (he is still the leading American goalscorer in MLS at the moment), but until there is evidence from Bradley that he values Cooper or Santino over Casey, or that he thinks he can get by with only three true forwards in a 23-man team because of the presence of Clint and LD, Casey is the No. 4 striker on this team and is probably going to SA.

 

Well, here comes the disconnect between the way we'd WANT to play and the way we sometimes HAVE to play.

If we could, we'd be better off building from the back, so that we could have a possession game that smoothly transitions from defense to attack without the need of the best hold-it-up guy in our pool and use that slot for a guy who can attack. Sure, that would be ideal.

Except that several of our guys in the back, including Bocanegra and Demerit (and I don't see anybody leaving BOTH of them off their lists, and with good reason!) just can't play that game under pressure. Even Onyewu's not particularly good at it (but neither is he as weak as those two). So.... sometimes they're just going to have to boot it up to some guy's head up front, and if that's the case, we're best off in those situations having a guy who can actually win it, hold the defense off, and get the ball to a teammate.

But there's the disconnect between the way we want to play, and the way we often have to play.

I contend that a healthy in-form Jones and/or Edu in the line-up ameliorates this somewhat. In the Confed Cup Clark was playing particularly well and aiding transition quite nicely as well, which helped obviate the need for so much of the route 1 stuff. And it's a good thing, too, because Jozy and Davies don't play the McBride/Ching game as well as those two did/do.

 

Did you really just pull the race card on me?

I could care less if he is purple, orange, green, black or white. I care if the guy can play. I don't think there is a lot of upside left in Marvel.

I don't care if his father played tiddlywinks or baseball or was a world class Curler. I care if the guy can play. I don't think there is a lot of upside left in Marvel.

The fact that you think my opinions are based on racism is pretty sickening as I have never in any post ever even hinted at a racist remark.

It has nothing to do with Black kid or White kid. It has to do with the lack of quality coaches at the youth level. A coach sees a kid who is bigger stronger and faster than every other kid out there, they tend to coach that kid less, because his natural ability is so far greater than everyone elses. Just kick Billy the ball and let him outrun everyone else.

Coaches put too much emphasis on winning at the youth level and not enough emphasis on actually teaching kids how to play the game. It gets that much worse when a coach actually gets his hands on a kid with more natural athletic ability than any other kid in the county.

 

The thing is, we're going to bring 8 defenders, and probably 9 midfielders (including Donovan and Dempsey). At least 4, quite likely 5 of those midfielder slots get taken by CMs. Going with 4 forwards, that means that there's only ONE backup/situational sub apart from Benny Feilhaber for Donovan and Dempsey.

Therefore, I think we go with 3 "true" forwards and 2 wide/attacking/creative midfield backups. In which case Casey would be left off if everybody's healthy.

That said, Bob's not going to commit to making that decision until the last minute and we see where we are with injuries and current form and all that. For example, if two of our CMs are down with injury, I don't think he's going to dig deep enough into our CM depth to come up with 2 names that he probably doesn't trust very much instead of one forward that he might have some trust in, and so forth.

Which means that, at this point in time, Casey is probably one of the last guys cut. However, there could still be competition for that 4th slot with him in the name of guys like (don't laugh, it's still a season away) EJ and Cooper.

 

Posting highlight videos of a young player's backheels and stepovers as proof that Bob's a moron for not playing him more is much more fun than actually thinking about the tactical issues at hand. I mean, soccer IQ is boring...


(Name that cheesy soccer movie. The line goes "Just give me the ball here, and I do this, this, this, this, goal! Easy!")

For what it's worth, I've failed to rate Wynne as highly as some other posters for the same reason. It's less a problem of lack of skill as it seems to be a lack of aptitude for understanding the game that I think hinders his development further. I think he's close to the point where "he is what he is." In contrast to another US defender primarily known for his physical package, and, um, dark skin: Onyewu. His game at first relied primarily upon his size and strength, but he struck me from early on as an intelligent guy who would figure it out given enough professional play. Well, he's gotten that play, and he's figured out how to make smart defensive decisions on the fly as a result.

I'll happily concede I'm wrong about Wynne when I see it.

 

I am not sure whether I agree with Adiago and will agree that race is a sensitive subject that people should be careful with. But I can sort of understand why he may have raised the issue. Quite frankly, I think people can be more sensitive, perhaps with good reason, in discussions of "intelligence" or "soccer Iq" when it comes to black players or other players of color.

And I would point out that you rather colorfully slammed Wynne's "soccer iq" several times and then supported that claim by making reference to things that have nothing whatsoever to do with soccer Iq [dribbling technique, crossing ability]. That is not to argue that Wynne has a decent soccer IQ or whether it can and has improved [I think it can, and it has]. I think he has shown improvement about when to get forward and positioning. He was not good against Costa Rica, but then neither were many in that first half.

But to me, Wynne is not so unlike Frankie Hejduk when he was young. He is raw, athletic and energetic and somewhat lacking in technique. I am not sure whether anyone wouldve questioned Frankie's soccer IQ as a young player. Perhaps they wouldve and did.

 

Well, I *did* include Ching, always have, in my 23.

I have to reproach him his lack of efficiency: he has missed some sitters, and some games he has done nothing while on the field but just wait for the perfect pass.

Sometimes he does get on my nerves. I'm screaming, "run back, run back so they can pass it to you and is not offside!" or "kick it to the goal, dang it! not 20' to the side, to the goal!"

But he is in my team. I just wish there were a better option. And no, it's not racism against Asians, gosh (before anyone brings that up).

 

Efficiency is the PRIMARY reason he has earned a spot.

Like most of our other players have...

100% false, absurd, ridiculous. If you can't see how hard Ching works when he's on the field (even if he's not streaking around doing flashy things with the ball), you simply don't understand the game.

? seriously?. Do you coach 6 year-olds?

You just brought it up. Brilliant move.